Keep calm and rage against the machine

 

Hollywood is on strike right now. In June, as the Directors Guild of America was about to sign its union contract with Hollywood studios, Lilly Wachowski (ironically of the Matrix fame) sent out a series of tweets explaining why she was voting no. 

The contact’s AI clause, which stipulates that generative AI can’t be considered a “person” or perform duties normally done by DGA members, didn’t go far enough. “We need to change the language to imply that we won’t use AI in any department, on any show we work on,” Wachowski wrote. “I strongly believe the fight we [are] in right now in our industry is a microcosm of a much larger and critical crisis.”

In simpler language, the unions wanted greater protections against being replaced or being further exploited by generative AI, the thing on the Internet/computers that has been creating content seemingly out of thin air from creating (sometimes truly creepy and unsettling artwork) to resurrecting singers long dead and gone.

And it's a whole comprehensive campaign with increasingly larger names getting involved and taking up the clarion call... think-piece after think-piece decrying how AI will soon be used to replace writers, actors, artists and on and on and on. And while I'm not suggesting that we stick our head in the sand and pretend that these threats aren't ever going to be real, there is no use in acting as if this alarmism isn't exactly what it is - alarmism, panic and hysteric reaching fever pitch over the whisper of a threat that has everyone looking in everywhere but the right direction.

This has happened before 

On a late January night in 1812, a mob hell-bent on violence stormed through the door of George Ball’s textile workshop on the outskirts of Nottingham, England. With handkerchiefs tied around their faces, the men slammed their targets with sledgehammers and fled, leaving behind five shattered knitting machines.

Claiming to take their orders from a “General Ludd,” the “Luddites” emerged as a violent force against changes in the textile industry. Raids on textile workshops became a nearly nightly occurrence in Nottingham since a labor uprising by highly skilled textile artisans began in November 1811. Artisans who had spent years perfecting their craft in apprenticeships protested the use of untrained workers who generally produced inferior products with mechanised machines. 

AI isn't the threat. Corporate greed and inequality is. 

 But here's the point of it all... many were willing to adapt to the mechanization of the textile industry as long as they shared in the profits. However, they watched as the productivity gains from technology enriched the capitalists, not the workers. English textile workers consistently found their efforts to negotiate for pensions, minimum wages and standard working conditions rebuffed. Unable to legally form trade unions or strike, the laborers instead wielded sledgehammers to strike a blow against industrial capitalism in what historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot.” 

Which is what's happening in Hollywood right now. And while it's easy to brush their demands aside as the rantings and ravings of a privileged class, it might be more productive to think of this strike as one of many starting points to fight the real enemy - corporate greed.